Model For Cooper's Indian Chingachgook Buried In Bethlehem Those Moravian `Mohicans'

October 01, 1992|by FRANK WHELAN, The Morning Call

The summer of 1746 was a cruel one for the Mohican Native American converts of the Bethlehem Moravians. Smallpox, a disease to which they had no immunity, was decimating their little community. Friedenshutten, or Huts of Peace, their little village located where Bethlehem's City Hall is today, was a place of sorrow.

Several of the unmarried male Indians that perished that summer lie together in Row 8 of the God's Acre cemetery. According to their grave markers, the first to die was Joseph, on July 21, 1746. He was followed by Petrus, known before his baptism as Nacasabamit.

Isaac, who had been converted at the Moravian's mission at Shekomeko near the New York-Connecticut border, died on Aug. 2, 1746. And then Thomas, whose Indian name was Pechtowappid and who was warden of the little Indian congregation, succumbed to the disease on Aug. 15, 1746.

But it was the death of another Native American on Aug. 27, 1746, that hit the Native American and white communities hardest. Born with the name Wasampa and nicknamed Job by fur traders, this Mohican was the best-known Moravian convert.

He had been taken into the church by preacher C.H. Rauch at Shekomeko, Conn., and baptized with the name John on April 16, 1742. That June, he had been accompanied by Rauch aboard the ship Catherine to greet the First Sea Congregation when they arrived in Philadelphia. Here, the Indian met Moravian church leader Count von Zinzendorf.

By 1745, the hostility of non-Moravian whites forced Job to move with his little band to Bethlehem. Here Tschoop, as the local Germans pronounced his nickname of Job, had found respect. His eloquence was well known, and despite occasional lapses into excessive rum drinking, Tschoop was a devout Christian. When they put him in the ground at God's Acre that August he was, in the words of one Moravian writer, "much lamented by his people and by the white Brethren."

When Moravian artist John Valentine Haidt, who arrived in Bethlehem in 1754, after Tschoop's death, did his painting "First Fruits," he included a figure that is said to be Job, the Mohican warrior. Ralph Schwarz, director of Historic Bethlehem Inc., feels that this is probably a good likeness of the Indian. "There are other copies of the `First Fruits' in Europe and they all identify this as Tschoop."

For the next 80 years, Tschoop rested quietly in God's Acre, remembered only by Moravians. Then an American novelist, James Fenimore Cooper, became fascinated by the romantic tales of North America during the French and Indian War of the late 1750s. He wanted to know about the era for his book, "The Last of the Mohicans," one in his series of Leatherstocking Tales.

But by 1826, nobody remembered much of how life was lived by the eastern American Indian tribes of the 1750s. There were still Indians around the Northeast who might have told Cooper something. But chances are he could not have understood them.

So Cooper went to the best written sources of his day, accounts of the life of 18th-century Indian tribes compiled by Moravian missionaries. Here he found much information on the aboriginal inhabitants of North America. And here, some scholars believe, he found in Tschoop the model for his Indian Chingachgook -- the "last of the Mohicans" of his book's title and the adopted father of his hero, the white trapper Hawkeye.

Now, 246 years after the Moravian Indian's death and 166 years after Cooper wrote "The Last of the Mohicans," Indian activist Russell Means is playing the role of Chingachgook in a new movie version of the novel released by 20th Century Fox. Hollywood is hoping that this tale of romance and war along the 18th-century frontier appeals to a contemporary audience.

Tschoop would never have come to Cooper's attention if he had not been first a Moravian. According to Schwarz, from the 1720s the Moravians felt that one of the most important things they could do was serve as missionaries to the unchurched and those who had lapsed from their faith. "It was not just to be a mission to the Indians. Moravians worked with the Germans whose churches were not active, with orphans and with blacks," says Schwarz.

But the Moravian involvement with the Indians was a unique part of their missionary impulse. The Catholic missions of the Spanish and French were deeply involved in work with Native Americans. But, with a few important exceptions, most Protestant ministers had little interest in Native Americans. There were so few clergy on Colonial America's frontier that keeping up with the needs of their far-flung congregations took up most of their time. They tended to regard Indians as, at best, hopeless pagans and, at worst, the human incarnation of the devil.